With the rapid development and popularization of cloud computing, the design and deployment of a data center, as a carrier for computing and storage, have become a focus of research in academic and industrial circles.
A data center generally includes multiple servers and a data transmission system disposed between the servers. Conventional data centers mostly adopt a two-layer tree structure including a core layer and an access layer, or a three-layer tree structure including a core layer, a convergence layer, and an access layer. Such tree structures have many defects. In one aspect, a multi-layer overlay architecture of two or three layers adopted has the defects such as high costs of a core switching device, large service delay between multi-hop devices, and limited flexibility. In another aspect, the conventional data centers mostly use the Ethernet transmission technology, in which the throughput of data transmission is rather limited. In still another aspect, the conventional data centers do not have a unified control and management plane, so scheduling of data streams cannot be considered from the perspective of full mesh topology.
With the increasingly growing scale of services borne by a data center, the data center itself faces challenges such as increased number of servers, growing requirements for bandwidth resources, and lower service delay. To meet higher requirements of users for the data center, multiple new data transmission architectures capable of being used in the data center exist in the prior art. For example, in a new data transmission system in the prior art, a three-layer network structure in the conventional data centers is simplified into a one-layer network architecture. The data transmission system specifically includes three parts: a node part, an interconnection part, and a director part. The node part is a distributed decision engine in the data transmission system, and is configured to connect a server so that the server is connected to the data transmission system for transmitting data, and the node part itself can be used as an Ethernet router. The interconnection part is a high-speed transmission device in the data transmission system and is configured to directly interconnect and transmit data of the node parts. The director part is a control part in the data transmission system and provides a common window for controlling all devices as one device. The main feature of the data transmission system is that a distributed data plane where all ports are interconnected is formed by multiple node parts, so that one-hop reachability from any node to another node is implemented.
However, first, the three constituent parts of the data transmission system must use auxiliary devices of the same series, and different products produced by different manufacturers are not supported in the networking process, that is, the compatibility of the data transmission system is poor; second, although the data transmission system can implement one-hop reachability from any node to another node, the data transmission system fails to meet requirements for the data transmission speed in some situations; and third, the networking costs are high when the data center is applied.